Nika Dubrovsky is an artist, writer, and founder of the David Graeber Institute and the Museum of Care.
Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and an author who grew up in the unofficial cultural scenes of squats and samizdat of the late USSR. She has written for e-flux, Artnet, ХЖ, and others, and exhibited at among others the Tel-Aviv Museum, St. Petersburg Manège, ShowRoom London, Media Udar, Fabrica Moscow, and apexart New York.
She works on several publishing and artistic projects, including a4kids.org—an open-source platform that experiments with new educational formats; Visual Assembly—a collective public art project; the Yes Women Group—art-activist feminist community; and others.
After her husband David Graeber’s death, Nika and friends organized Carnival4David, which held events in 250 places around the world. Carnival4David evolved into the informal community the Museum of Care, which is creating projects at the intersection of academia, activism, and contemporary art.
The Fight Club is one of the Museum of Care projects. It aims to create a public space to discuss what Dostoyevsky called the "cursed questions": what is power, what is freedom, value, and so on.
Her books and articles have been published in Finnish, English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Japanese, and other languages. In a series of #artcommunism articles, written in collaboration with David Graeber, she reflects on the possibility of a world in which the very idea of having a resume becomes meaningless: a world where everyone can become an artist.
Nika Dubrovsky and Allegra assistant editor Emilie Thevenoz sat down together over Zoom. Their chat covered the pedagogical concepts and ideas that guide Nika’s work, the ways anthropology can help children question the value systems they inherited and why that’s important, the way publishing houses are not quite ready yet for more open-sourced ways of sharing information, and the importance of asking the right questions.
What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika’s then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit—because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.
Mainly it is about a public debate on how to rearrange our social spaces (the Health Care system, Education, and so on).
The creators hope that the tools, developed by the people working with the Visual Assembly project will be used by activists, artists, work collectives, and just people—all of us, to rethink how we relate to each other, how we live, study, and work.
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John Phillips, an artist, designer, printmaker, and curator of Museum of Unrest, interviews Nika Dubrovsky about how the Museum of Care project came about.